Posts Tagged ‘Twin Peaks’

Note: Spoilers follow for the first and second seasons of The Good Place.

When I began watching The Good Place, I thought that I already knew most of its secrets. I had missed the entire first season, and I got interested in it mostly due to a single review by Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker, which might be my favorite piece so far from one of our most interesting critics. Nussbaum has done more than anyone else in the last decade to elevate television criticism into an art in itself, and this article—with its mixture of the critical, personal, and political—displays all her strengths at their best. Writing of the sitcom’s first season finale, which aired the evening before Trump’s inauguration, Nussbaum says: “Many fans, including me, were looking forward to a bit of escapist counterprogramming, something frothy and full of silly puns, in line with the first nine episodes. Instead, what we got was the rare season finale that could legitimately be described as a game-changer, vaulting the show from a daffy screwball comedy to something darker, much stranger, and uncomfortably appropriate for our apocalyptic era.” Following that grabber of an opening, she continues with a concise summary of the show’s complicated premise:

The first episode is about a selfish American jerk, Eleanor (the elfin charmer Kristen Bell), who dies and goes to Heaven, owing to a bureaucratic error. There she is given a soul mate, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a Senegal-raised moral philosopher. When Chidi discovers that Eleanor is an interloper, he makes an ethical leap, agreeing to help her become a better person…Overseeing it all was Michael, an adorably flustered angel-architect played by Ted Danson; like Leslie Knope, he was a small-town bureaucrat who adored humanity and was desperate to make his flawed community perfect.

There’s a lot more involved, of course, and we haven’t even mentioned most of the other key players. It’s an intriguing setup for a television show, and it might have been enough to get me to watch it on its own. Yet what really caught my attention was Nussbaum’s next paragraph, which includes the kind of glimpse into a critic’s writing life that you only see when emotions run high: “After watching nine episodes, I wrote a first draft of this column based on the notion that the show, with its air of flexible optimism, its undercurrent of uplift, was a nifty dialectical exploration of the nature of decency, a comedy that combined fart jokes with moral depth. Then I watched the finale. After the credits rolled, I had to have a drink.” She then gives away the whole game, which I’m obviously going to do here as well. You’ve been warned:

In the final episode, we learn that it was no bureaucratic mistake that sent Eleanor to Heaven. In fact, she’s not in Heaven at all. She’s in Hell—which is something that Eleanor realizes, in a flash of insight, as the characters bicker, having been forced as a group to choose two of them to be banished to the Bad Place. Michael is no angel, either. He’s a low-ranking devil, a corporate Hell architect out on his first big assignment, overseeing a prankish experimental torture cul-de-sac. The malicious chuckle that Danson unfurls when Eleanor figures it out is both terrifying and hilarious, like a clap of thunder on a sunny day. “Oh, God!” he growls, dropping the mask. “You ruin everything, you know that?”

That’s a legitimately great twist, and when I suggested to my wife—who didn’t know anything about it—that we check it out on Netflix, it was partially so that I could enjoy her surprise at that moment, like a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire eagerly watching an unsuspecting friend during the Red Wedding.

Yet I was the one who really got fooled. The Good Place became my favorite sitcom since Community, and for almost none of the usual reasons. It’s very funny, of course, but I find that the jokes land about half the time, and it settles for what Nussbaum describes as “silly puns” more often than it probably should. Many episodes are closer to freeform comedy—the kind in which the riffs have less to do with context than with whatever the best pitch happened to be in the writers room—than to the clockwork farce to which it ought to aspire. But its flaws don’t really matter. I haven’t been so involved with the characters on a series like this in years, which allows it to take risks and get away with formal experiments that would destroy a lesser show. After the big revelation in the first season finale, it repeatedly blew up its continuity, with Michael resetting the memories of the others and starting over whenever they figured out his plan, but somehow, it didn’t leave me feeling jerked around. This is partially thanks to how the show cleverly conflates narrative time with viewing time, which is one of the great unsung strengths of the medium. (When the second season finally gets on track, these “versions” of the characters have only known one another for a couple of weeks, but every moment is enriched by our memories of their earlier incarnations. It’s a good trick, but it’s not so different from the realization, for example, that all of the plot twists and relationships ofthe first two seasons of Twin Peaks unfolded over less than a month.) It also speaks to the talent of the cast, which consistently rises to every challenge. And it does a better job of telling a serialized story than any sitcom that I can remember. Even while I was catching up with it, I managed to parcel it out over time, but I can also imagine binging an entire season at one sitting. That’s mostly due to the fact that the writers are masters of structure, if not always at filling the spaces between act breaks, but it’s also because the stakes are literally infinite.

And the stakes apply to all of us. It’s hard to come away from The Good Place without revisiting some of your assumptions about ethics, the afterlife, and what it means to be a good person. (The inevitable release of The Good Place and Philosophy might actually be worth reading.) I’m more aware of how much I’ve internalized the concept of “moral desert,” or the notion that good behavior will be rewarded, which we should all know by now isn’t true. In its own unpretentious way, the series asks its viewers to contemplate the problem of how to live when there might not be a prize awaiting us at the end. It’s the oldest question imaginable, but it seems particularly urgent these days, and the show’s answers are more optimistic than we have any right to expect. Writing just a few weeks after the inauguration, Nussbaum seems to project some of her own despair onto creator Michael Schur:

While I don’t like to read the minds of showrunners—or, rather, I love to, but it’s presumptuous—I suspect that Schur is in a very bad mood these days. If [Parks and Recreation] was a liberal fantasia, The Good Place is a dystopian mindfork: it’s a comedy about the quest to be moral even when the truth gets bent, bullies thrive, and sadism triumphs…Now that his experiment has crashed, [the character of] Michael plans to erase the ensemble’s memories and reboot. The second season—presuming the show is renewed (my mouth to God’s ear)—will start the same scheme from scratch. Michael will make his afterlife Sims suffer, no matter how many rounds it takes.

Yet in the second season hinges on an unlikely change of heart. Michael comes to care about his charges—he even tries to help them escape to the real Good Place—and his newfound affection doesn’t seem like another mislead. I’m not sure if I believe it, but I’m still grateful. It isn’t a coincidence that Michael shares his name with the show’s creator, and I’d like to think that Schur ended up with a kinder version of the series than he may have initially envisioned. Like Nussbaum, he tore up the first draft and started over. Life is hard enough as it is, and the miracle of The Good Place is that it takes the darkest view imaginable of human nature, and then it gently hints that we might actually be capable of becoming better.

A few months ago, I was on the phone with a trusted adviser to discuss some revisions to Astounding. We were focusing on the prologue, which I had recently rewritten from scratch to make it more accessible to readers who weren’t already fans of science fiction. Among other things, I’d been asked to come up with ways in which the impact of my book’s four subjects was visible in modern pop culture, and after throwing some ideas back and forth, my adviser asked me plaintively: “Couldn’t you just say that without John W. Campbell, we wouldn’t have Game of Thrones?” I was tempted to give in, but I ultimately didn’t—it just felt like too much of a stretch. (Which isn’t to say that the influence isn’t there. When a commenter on his blog asked whether his work had been inspired by the mythographer Joseph Campbell, George R.R. Martin replied: “The Campbell that influenced me was John W., not Joseph.” And that offhand comment was enough of a selling point that I put it in the very first sentence of my book proposal.) Still, I understood the need to frame the story in ways that would resonate with a mainstream readership, and I thought hard about what other reference points I could honestly provide. Star Trek was an easy one, along with such recent movies as Interstellar and The Martian, but the uncomfortable reality is that much of what we call science fiction in film and television has more to do with Star Wars. But I wanted to squeeze in one last example, and I finally settled on this line about Campbell: “For more than three decades, an unparalleled series of visions of the future passed through his tiny office in New York, where he inaugurated the main sequence of science fiction that runs through works from 2001 to Westworld.”

As the book is being set in type, I’m still comfortable with this sentence as it stands, although there are a few obvious qualifications that ought to be made. Westworld, of course, is based on a movie written and directed by Michael Crichton, whose position in the history of the genre is a curious one. As I’ve written elsewhere, Crichton was an unusually enterprising author of paperback thrillers who found himself with an unexpected blockbuster in the form of The Andromeda Strain. It was his sixth novel, and his first in hardcover, and it seems to have benefited enormously from the input of editor Robert Gottlieb, who wrote in his memoir Avid Reader:

The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept, but it was a mess—sloppily plotted, underwritten, and worst of all, with no characterization whatsoever. [Crichton’s] scientists were beyond generic—they lacked all human specificity; the only thing that distinguished some of them from the others was that some died and some didn’t. I realized right away that with his quick mind, swift embrace of editorial input, and extraordinary work habits he could patch the plot, sharpen the suspense, clarify the science—in fact, do everything necessary except create convincing human beings. (He never did manage to; eventually I concluded that he couldn’t write about people because they just didn’t interest him.) It occurred to me that instead of trying to help him strengthen the human element, we could make a virtue of necessity by stripping it away entirely; by turning The Andromeda Strain from a documentary novel into a fictionalized documentary. Michael was all for it—I think he felt relieved.

The result, to put it mildly, did quite well, and Crichton quickly put its lessons to work. But it’s revealing that the flaws that Gottlieb cites—indifferent plotting, flat writing, and a lack of real characterization—are also typical of even some of the best works of science fiction that came out of Campbell’s circle. Crichton’s great achievement was to focus relentlessly on everything else, especially readability, and it’s fair to say that he did a better job of it than most of the writers who came up through Astounding and Analog. He was left with the reputation of a carpetbagger, and his works may have been too square and fixated on technology to ever be truly fashionable. Yet a lot of it can be traced back to his name on the cover. In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges speaks of enriching “the slow and rudimentary act of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution.” In this case, it’s pretty useful. I have a hunch that if The Terminal Man, Congo, and Sphere had been attributed on their first release to Robert A. Heinlein, they would be regarded as minor classics. They’re certainly better than many of the books that Heinlein was actually writing around the same time. And if I’m being honest, I should probably confess that I’d rather read Jurassic Park again than any of Asimov’s novels. (As part of my research for this book, I dutifully made my way through Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage, which came out just three years before The Andromeda Strain, and his fumbling of that very Crichtonesque premise only reminded me of how good at this sort of thing Crichton really was.) If Crichton had been born thirty years earlier, John W. Campbell would have embraced him like a lost son, and he might well have written a better movie than Destination Moon.

At its best, the television version of Westworld represents an attempt to reconcile Crichton’s gifts for striking premises and suspense with the more introspective mode of the genre to which he secretly belongs. (It’s no accident that Jonathan Nolan had been developing it in parallel with Foundation.) This balance hasn’t always been easy to manage, and last night’s premiere suggests that it can only become more difficult going forward. Westworld has always seemed defined by the pattern of forces that were acting on it—its source material, its speculative and philosophical ambitions, and the pressure of being a flagship drama on HBO. It also has to deal now with the legacy of its own first season, which set a precedent for playing with time, as well as the scrutiny of viewers who figured it out prematurely. The stakes here are established early on, with Bernard awakening on a beach in a sequence that seems like a nod to the best film by Nolan’s brother, and this time around, the parallel timelines are put front and center. Yet the strain occasionally shows. The series is still finding itself, with characters, like Dolores, who seem to be thinking through their story arcs out loud. It’s overly insistent on its violence and nudity, but it’s also cerebral and detached, with little possibility of real emotional pain that the third season of Twin Peaks was able to inflict. I don’t know if the center will hold. Yet’s also possible that these challenges were there from the beginning, as the series tried to reconcile Crichton’s tricks with the tradition of science fiction that it clearly honors. I still believe that this show is in the main line of the genre’s development. Its efforts to weave together its disparate influences strike me as worthwhile and important. And I hope that it finds its way home.

After the great character actor Harry Dean Stanton died earlier this week, Deadspin reprinted a profile by Steve Oney from the early eighties that offers a glimpse of a man whom many of us recognized but few of us knew. It captured Stanton at a moment when he was edging into a kind of stardom, but he was still open about his doubts and struggles: “It was Eastern mysticism that began to help me. Alan Watts’s books on Zen Buddhism were a very strong influence. Taoism and Lao-tse, I read much of, along with the works of Krishnamurti. And I studied tai chi, the martial art, which is all about centering oneself.” Oney continues:

But it was the I Ching (The Book of Changes) in which Stanton found most of his strength. By his bedside he keeps a bundle of sticks wrapped in blue ribbon. Several times every week, he throws them (or a handful of coins) and then turns to the book to search out the meaning of the pattern they made. “I throw them whenever I need input,” he said. “It’s an addendum to my subconscious.” He now does this before almost everything he undertakes—interviews, films, meetings. “It has sustained and nourished me,” he said. “But I’m not qualified to expound on it.”

I was oddly moved by these lines. The I Ching doesn’t tell you what the future will be, but it offers advice on how to behave, which makes it the perfect oracle for a character actor, whose career is inextricably tied up with luck, timing, persistence, and synchronicity.

Stanton, for reasons that even he might have found hard to grasp, became its patron saint. “What he wants is that one magic part, the one they’ll mention in film dictionaries, that will finally make up for all the awful parts from early in his career,” Oney writes. That was thirty years ago, and it never really happened. Most of the entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film is devoted to listing Stanton’s gigantic filmography, and its one paragraph of analysis is full of admiration for his surface, not his depths:

He is among the last of the great supporting actors, as unfailing and visually eloquent as Anthony Mann’s trees or “Mexico” in a Peckinpah film. Long ago, a French enthusiastic said that Charlton Heston was “axiomatic.” He might want that pensée back now. But Stanton is at least emblematic of sad films of action and travel. His face is like the road in the West.

This isn’t incorrect, but it’s still incomplete. In Oney’s profile, the young Sean Penn, who adopted Stanton as his mentor, offers the same sort of faint praise: “Behind that rugged old cowboy face, he’s simultaneously a man, a child, a woman—he just has this full range of emotions I really like. He’s a very impressive soul more than he is a mind, and I find that attractive.” I don’t want to discount the love there. But it’s also possible that Stanton never landed the parts that he deserved because his friends never got past that sad, wonderful face, which was a blessing that also obscured his subtle, indefinable talent.

Stanton’s great trick was to seem to sidle almost sideways into the frame, never quite taking over a film but immeasurably enriching it, and he’s been a figure on the edges of my moviegoing life for literally as long as I can remember. He appeared in what I’m pretty sure was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, Philip Borsos’s One Magic Christmas, which prompted Roger Ebert to write: “I am not sure exactly what I think about Harry Dean Stanton’s archangel. He is sad-faced and tender, all right, but he looks just like the kind of guy that our parents told us never to talk to.” Stanton got on my radar thanks largely to Ebert, who went so far as to define a general rule: “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.” And my memory is seasoned with stray lines and moments delivered in his voice. As the crooked, genial preacher in Uforia: “Everybody’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” Or the father in Pretty in Pink, after Molly Ringwald wakes him up at home one morning: “Where am I?” Or Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ, speaking to the aged Jesus: “You know, I’m glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you.” One movie that I haven’t seen mentioned in most retrospectives of his career is Francis Coppola’s One From the Heart, in which Stanton unobtrusively holds his own in the corner of the film that killed Zoetrope Studios. Thomson describes his work as “funny, casual, and quietly disintegrating,” and when the camera dollies to the left near the beginning of the film as he asks Frederick Forrest’s character why he keeps buying so much junk, it’s as if he’s talking to Coppola himself.

Most of all, I’ve always loved Stanton’s brief turn as Carl, the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in which he offered the FBI agents “a cup of Good Morning America.” And one of the great pleasures of the revival of Twin Peaks was the last look it gave us of Carl, who informed a younger friend: “I’ve been smoking for seventy-five years—every fuckin’ day.” Cigarettes were curiously central to his mystique, as surely as they shaped his face and voice. Oney writes: “In other words, Stanton is sixty going on twenty-two, a seeker who also likes to drive fast cars, dance all night, and chain-smoke cigarettes with the defiant air of a hood hanging out in the high school boy’s room.” In his last starring role, the upcoming Lucky, he’s described as having “outlived and out-smoked” his contemporaries. And, more poignantly, he said to Esquire a decade ago: “I only eat so I can smoke and stay alive.” Smoking, like casting a hexagam, feels like the quintessential pastime of the character actor—it’s the vice of those who sit and wait. In an interview that he gave a few years ago, Stanton effortlessly linked all of these themes together:

We’re not in charge of our lives and there are no answers to anything. It’s a divine mystery. Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah—it’s all the same thing, but once it gets organized it’s over. You have to just accept everything. I’m still smoking a pack a day.

If you didn’t believe in the I Ching, there was always smoking, and if you couldn’t believe in either one, you could believe in Stanton. Because everybody’s got to believe in something.

About halfway through the beautiful, devastating finale of Twin Peaks—which I’ll be discussing here in detail—I began to reflect on what the figure of Dale Cooper really means. When we encounter him for the first time in the pilot, with his black suit, fastidious habits, and clipped diction, he’s the embodiment of what we’ve been taught to expect of a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI occupies a role in movies and television far out of proportion to its actual powers and jurisdiction, in part because it seems to exist on a level intriguingly beyond that of ordinary law enforcement, and it’s often been used to symbolize the sinister, the remote, or the impersonal. Yet when Cooper reveals himself to be a man of real empathy, quirkiness, and faith in the extraordinary, it comes almost as a relief. We want to believe that a person like this exists. Cooper carries a badge, he wears a tie, and he’s comfortable with a gun, but he’s here to enforce human reason in the face of a bewildering universe. The Black Lodge might be out there, but the Blue Rose task force is on it, and there’s something oddly consoling about the notion that it’s a part of the federal government. A few years later, Chris Carter took this premise and refined it into The X-Files, which, despite its paranoia, reassured us that somebody in a position of authority had noticed the weirdness in the world and was trying to make sense of it. They might rarely succeed, but it was comforting to think that their efforts had been institutionalized, complete with a basement office, a place in the org chart, and a budget. And for a lot of viewers, Mulder and Scully, like Cooper, came to symbolize law and order in stories that laugh at our attempts to impose it.

Even if you don’t believe in the paranormal, the image of the lone FBI agent—or two of them—arriving in a small town to solve a supernatural mystery is enormously seductive. It appeals to our hopes that someone in power cares enough about us to investigate problems that can’t be rationally addressed, which all stand, in one way or another, for the mystery of death. This may be why both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, despite their flaws, have sustained so much enthusiasm among fans. (No other television dramas have ever meant more to me.) But it’s also a myth. This isn’t really how the world works, and the second half of the Twin Peaks finale is devoted to tearing down, with remarkable cruelty and control, the very idea of such solutions. It can only do this by initially giving us what we think we want, and the first of last night’s two episodes misleads us with a satisfying dose of wish fulfillment. Not only is Cooper back, but he’s in complete command of the situation, and he seems to know exactly what to do at every given moment. He somehow knows all about Freddie and his magical green glove, which he utilizes to finally send Bob into oblivion. After rescuing Diane, he uses his room key from the Great Northern, like a magical item in a video game, to unlock the door that leads him to Mike and the disembodied Phillip Jeffries. He goes back in time, enters the events of Fire Walk With Me, and saves Laura on the night of her murder. The next day, Pete Martell simply goes fishing. Viewers at home even get the appearance by Julee Cruise that I’ve been awaiting since the premiere. After the credits ran, I told my wife that if it had ended there, I would have been totally satisfied.

But that was exactly what I was supposed to think, and even during the first half, there are signs of trouble. When Cooper first sees the eyeless Naido, who is later revealed to be the real Diane, his face freezes in a huge closeup that is superimposed for several minutes over the ensuing action. It’s a striking device that has the effect of putting us, for the first time, in Cooper’s head, rather than watching him with bemusement from the outside. We identify with him, and at the very end, when his efforts seemingly come to nothing, despite the fact that he did everything right, it’s more than heartbreaking—it’s like an existential crisis. It’s the side of the show that was embodied by Sheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer, whose tragic life and horrifying death, when seen in its full dimension, put the lie to all the cozy, comforting stories that the series told us about the town of Twin Peaks. Nothing good could ever come out of a world in which Laura died in the way that she did, which was the message that Fire Walk With Me delivered so insistently. And seeing Laura share the screen at length with Cooper presents us with both halves of the show’s identity within a single frame. (It also gives us a second entry, after Blue Velvet, in the short list of great scenes in which Kyle MacLachlan enters a room to find a man sitting down with his brains blown out.) For a while, as Cooper drives Laura to the appointment with her mother, it seems almost possible that the series could pull off one last, unfathomable trick. Even if it means erasing the show’s entire timeline, it would be worth it to save Laura. Or so we think. In the end, they return to a Twin Peaks that neither of them recognize, in which the events of the series presumably never took place, and Cooper’s only reward is Laura’s scream of agony.

As I tossed and turned last night, thinking about Cooper’s final, shattering moment of comprehension, a line of dialogue from another movie drifted into my head: “It’s too late. There’s no bringing her back.” It’s from Vertigo, of course, which is a movie that David Lynch and Mark Frost have been quietly urging us to revisit all along. (Madeline Ferguson, Laura’s identical cousin, who was played by Lee, is named after the film’s two main characters, and both works of art pivot on a necklace and a dream sequence.) Along with so much else, Vertigo is about the futility of trying to recapture or change the past, and its ending, which might be the most unforgettable of any film I’ve ever seen, destroys Scotty’s delusions, which embody the assumptions of so many American movies: “One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be rid of the past forever.” I think that Lynch and Frost are consciously harking back to Vertigo here—in the framing of the doomed couple on their long drive, as well as in Cooper’s insistence that Laura revisit the scene of the crime—and it doesn’t end well in either case. The difference is that Vertigo prepares us for it over the course of two hours, while Twin Peaks had more than a quarter of a century. Both works offer a conclusion that feels simultaneously like a profound statement of our helplessness in the face of an unfair universe and like the punchline to a shaggy dog story, and perhaps that’s the only way to express it. I’ve quoted Frost’s statement on this revival more than once: “It’s an exercise in engaging with one of the most powerful themes in all of art, which is the ruthless passage of time…We’re all trapped in time and we’re all going to die. We’re all traveling along this conveyor belt that is relentlessly moving us toward this very certain outcome.” Thirty seconds before the end, I didn’t know what he meant. But I sure do now. And I know at last why this show’s theme is called “Falling.”

Note: This post reveals plot details from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

One of the central insights of my life as a reader is that certain kinds of narrative are infinitely expansible or contractible. I first started thinking about this in college, when I was struggling to read Homer in Greek. Oral poetry, I discovered, wasn’t memorized, but composed on the fly, aided by the poet’s repertoire of stock lines, formulas, and images that happened to fit the meter. This meant that the overall length of the composition was highly variable. A scene that takes up just a few lines in the Iliad that survives could be expanded into an entire night’s recital, based on what the audience wanted to hear. (For instance, the characters of Crethon and Orsilochus, who appear for only twenty lines in the existing version before being killed by Aeneas, might have been the stars of the evening if the poet happened to be working in Pherae.) That kind of flexibility originated as a practical consequence of the oral form, but it came to affect the aesthetics of the poem itself, which could grow or shrink to accommodate anything that the poet wanted to talk about. Homer uses his metaphors to introduce miniature narratives of human life that don’t otherwise fit into a poem of war, and some amount to self-contained short stories in themselves. Proust operates in much the same way. One observation leads naturally to another, and an emotion or analogy evoked in passing can unfold like a paper flower into three dense pages of reflections. In theory, any novel could be expanded like this, like a hypertext that opens into increasingly deeper levels. In Search of Lost Time happens to be the one book in existence in which all of these flowerings have been preserved, with a plot could fit into a novella of two hundred unhurried pages.

Something similar appears to have happened with the current season of Twin Peaks, and when you start to think of it in those terms, its structure, which otherwise seems almost perversely shapeless, begins to make more sense. In the initial announcement by Showtime, the revival was said to consist of nine episodes, and Mark Frost even said to Buzzfeed:

If you think back about the first season, if you put the pilot together with the seven that we did, you get nine hours. It just felt like the right number. I’ve always felt the story should take as long as the story takes to tell. That’s what felt right to us.

It was doubled to eighteen after a curious interlude in which David Lynch dropped out of the project, citing budget constraints: “I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done.” He came back, of course, and shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the length of the season had increased. Yet there was never any indication that either Lynch or Frost had done any additional writing. My personal hunch is that they always had nine episodes of material, and this never changed. What happened is that the second act of the show expanded in the fashion that I’ve described above, creating a long central section that was free to explore countless byways without much concern for the plot. The beginning, and presumably the end, remained more or less as conceived—it was the middle that grew. And a quick look at the structure of the season so far seems to confirm this. The first three episodes, which take Cooper from inside the Black Lodge to slightly before his meeting with his new family in Las Vegas, seemed weird at the time, but now they look positively conventional in terms of how much story they covered. They were followed by three episodes, the Dougie Jones arc, that were expanded beyond recognition. And now that we’ve reached the final three, which account for the third act of the original outline, it makes sense for Cooper to return at last.

If the season had consisted of just those nine episodes, I suspect that more viewers would have been able to get behind it. Even if the second act had doubled in length—giving us a total of twelve installments, of which three would have been devoted to detours and loose ends—I doubt that most fans would have minded. It’s expanding that middle section to four times its size, without any explanation, that lost a lot of people. But it’s clearly the only way that Lynch would have returned. For most of the last decade, Lynch has been contentedly pottering around with odd personal projects, concentrating on painting, music, digital video, and other media that don’t require him to be answerable to anyone but himself. The Twin Peaks revival, after the revised terms had been negotiated with Showtime, allowed him to do this with a larger budget and for a vastly greater audience. Much of this season has felt like Lynch’s private sketchbook or paintbox, allowing him to indulge himself within each episode as long as the invisible scaffolding of the original nine scripts remained. The fact that so much of the strangeness of this season has been visual and nonverbal points to Lynch, rather than Frost, as the driving force on this end. And at its best, it represents something like a reinvention of television, which is the most expandable or compressible medium we have, but which has rarely utilized this quality to its full extent. (There’s an opening here, obviously, for a fan edit that condenses the season down to nine episodes, leaving the first and last three intact while shrinking the middle twelve. It would be an interesting experiment, although I’m not sure I’d want to watch it.)

Of course, this kind of aggressive attack on the structure of the narrative doesn’t come without a cost. In the case of Twin Peaks, the primary casualty has been the Dougie Jones storyline, which has been criticized for three related reasons. The first, and most understandable, is that we’re naturally impatient to get the old Cooper back. Another is that this material was never meant to go on for this long, and it starts to feel a little thin when spread over twelve episodes. And the third is that it prevents Kyle MacLachlan, the ostensible star of the show, from doing what he does best. This last criticism feels like the most valid. MacLachlan has played an enormous role in my life as a moviegoer and television viewer, but he operates within a very narrow range, with what I might inadequately describe as a combination of rectitude, earnestness, and barely concealed eccentricity. (In other words, it’s all but indistinguishable from the public persona of David Lynch himself.) It’s what made his work as Jeffrey in Blue Velvet so moving, and a huge part of the appeal of Twin Peaks lay in placing this character at the center of what looked like a procedural. MacLachlan can also convey innocence and darkness, but by bringing these two traits to the forefront, and separating them completely in Dougie and Dark Cooper, it robs us of the amalgam that makes MacLachlan interesting in the first place. Like many stars, he’s chafed under the constraints of his image, and perhaps he even welcomed the challenges that this season presented—although he may not have known how his performance would look when extended past its original dimensions and cut together with the rest. When Cooper returned last night, it reminded me of how much I’ve missed him. And the fact that we’ll get him for two more episodes, along with everything else that this season has offered us, feels more than ever like a gift.

“Did you call me five days ago?” Dark Cooper asks the shadowy shape in the darkness in the most recent episode of Twin Peaks. It’s a memorable moment for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that he’s addressing the disembodied Philip Jeffries, who was played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me, and is now portrayed by a different voice actor and what looks to be a sentient tea kettle. But that didn’t even strike me as the weirdest part. What hit me hardest is the implication that everything that we’ve seen so far this season has played out over less than a week in real time—the phone call to which Dark Cooper is referring occurred during the second episode. Admittedly, there are indications that the events onscreen have unfolded in a nonlinear fashion, not to draw attention to itself, but to allow David Lynch and Mark Frost to cut between storylines according to their own rhythms, rather than being tied down to chronology. (The text message that Dark Cooper sends at the end of the scene was received by Diane a few episodes ago, while Audrey’s painful interactions with Charlie apparently consist of a single conversation parceled out over multiple weeks. And the Dougie Jones material certainly feels as if it occurs over a longer period than five days, although it’s probably possible to squeeze it into that timeline if necessary.) And if viewers are brought up short by the contrast between the show’s internal calendar and its emotional duration, it’s happened before. When I look back at the first two seasons of the show, I’m still startled to realize that every event from Laura’s murder to Cooper’s possession unfolds over just one month.

Why does this feel so strange? The obvious answer is that we get to know these characters over a period of years, while we really only see them in action for a few weeks, and their interactions with one another end up carrying more weight than you might expect for people who, in some cases, met only recently. And television is the one medium that routinely creates that kind of disparity. It’s inherently impossible for a movie to take longer to watch than the events that it depicts—apart from a handful, like Run Lola Run or Vantage Point, that present scrambled timelines or stage the same action from multiple perspectives—and it usually compresses days or weeks of action within a couple of hours. With books, the length of the act of reading varies from one reader to the next, and we’re unlikely to find it particularly strange that it can take months to finish Ulysses, which recounts the events of a single day. It’s only television, particularly when experienced in its original run, that presents such a sharp contrast between narrative and emotional time, even if we don’t tend to worry about this with sitcoms, procedurals, and other nonserialized shows. (One interesting exception consists of shows set in high school or college, in which it’s awfully tempting to associate each season with an academic year, although there’s no reason why a series like Community couldn’t take place over a single semester.) Shows featuring children or teenagers have a built-in clock that reminds us of how time is passing in the real world, as Urkel or the Olsen twins progress inexorably toward puberty. And occasionally there’s an outlier like The Simpsons, in which a quarter of a century’s worth of storylines theoretically takes place within the same year or so.

But the way in which a serialized show can tell a story that occurs over a short stretch of narrative time while simultaneously drawing on the emotional energy that builds up over years is one of the unsung strengths of the entire medium. Our engagement with a favorite show that airs on a weekly basis isn’t just limited to the hour that we spend watching it every Sunday, but expands to fill much of the time in between. If a series really matters to us, it gets into our dreams. (I happened to miss the initial airing of this week’s episode because I was on vacation with my family, and I’ve been so conditioned to get my fix of Twin Peaks on a regular basis that I had a detailed dream about an imaginary episode that night—which hasn’t happened to me since I had to wait a week to watch the series finale of Breaking Bad. As far as I can remember, my dream involved the reappearance of Sheriff Harry Truman, who has been institutionalized for years, with his family and friends describing him euphemistically as “ill.” And I wouldn’t mention it here at all if this weren’t a show that has taught me to pay close attention to my dreamlife.) Many of us also spend time between episodes in reading reviews, discussing plot points online, and catching up with various theories about where it might go next. In a few cases, as with Westworld, this sort of active analysis can be detrimental to the experience of watching the show itself, if you see it as a mystery with clues that the individual viewer is supposed to crack on his or her own. For the most part, though, it’s an advantage, with time conferring an emotional weight that the show might not have otherwise had. As the world spins, the series stays where it was, and we’ve all changed in the meantime.

The revival of Twin Peaks takes this tendency and magnifies it beyond anything else we’ve seen before, with its fans investing it with twenty-five years of accumulated energy—and this doesn’t even account for the hundreds of hours that I spent listening to the show’s original soundtrack, which carries an unquantifiable duration of its own. And one of the charming things about this season is how Lynch and Frost seem to have gone through much the same experience themselves, mulling over their own work until stray lines and details take on a greater significance. When Dark Cooper goes to his shadowy meeting above a convenience store, it’s paying off on a line that Mike, the one-armed man, uttered in passing during a monologue from the first Bush administration. The same applies to the show’s references to a mysterious “Judy,” whom Jeffries mentioned briefly just before disappearing forever. I don’t think that these callbacks reflect a coherent plan that Lynch and Frost have been keeping in their back pockets for decades, but a process of going back to tease out meanings that even they didn’t know were there. Smart writers of serialized narratives learn to drop vague references into their work that might pay off later on. (Two of my favorite examples are Spock’s “Remember” at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the Second Foundation, which Isaac Asimov introduced in case he needed it in a subsequent installment.) What Twin Peaks is doing now is analogous to what the writers of Breaking Bad did when they set up problems that they didn’t know how to solve, trusting that they would figure it out eventually. The only difference is that Lynch and Frost, like the rest of us, have had more time to think about it. And it might take us another twenty-five years before we—or they—figure out what they were actually doing.

Note: This post discusses details from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

When I was working as a film critic in college, one of my first investments was a wristwatch that could glow in the dark. If you’re sitting through an interminable slog of a movie, sometimes you simply want to know how much longer the pain will last, and, assuming that you have a sense of the runtime, a watch puts a piece of narrative information at your disposal that has nothing to do with the events of the story itself. Even if you’re enjoying yourself, the knowledge that a film has twenty minutes left to run—which often happens if you’re watching it at home and staring right at the numbers on the display of your DVD player—affects the way you think about certain scenes. A climax plays differently near the end, as opposed to somewhere in the middle. The length of a work of art is a form of metadata that influences the way we watch movies and read books, as Douglas Hofstadter points out in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

You have undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories—but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can feel that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels…A lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book.

Not surprisingly, I tend to think about the passage of time the most when I’m not enjoying the story. When I’m invested in the experience, I’ll do the opposite: I’ll actively resist glancing at the clock or looking to see how much time has elapsed. When I know that the credits are going to roll no matter what within the next five minutes, it amounts to a spoiler. With Twin Peaks, which has a narrative that can seemingly be cut anywhere, like yard goods, I try not to think about how long I’ve been watching. Almost inevitably, the episode ends before I’m ready for it, in part because it provides so few of the usual cues that we’ve come to expect from television. There aren’t any commercial breaks, obviously, but the stories also don’t divide neatly into three or four acts. In the past, most shows, even those that aired without interruption on cable networks, followed certain structural conventions that allow us to guess when the story is coming to an end. (This is even more true of Hollywood movies, which, with their mandated beat sheets—the inciting incident, the midpoint, the false dawn, the crisis—practically tell the audience how much longer they need to pay attention, which may be the reason why such rules exist in the first place.) Now that streaming services allow serialized stories to run for hours without worrying about the narrative shape of individual episodes, this is less of an issue, and it can be a mixed blessing. But at its best, on a show like Twin Peaks, it creates a feeling of narrative suspension, cutting us off from any sense of the borders of the episode until the words Starring Kyle MacLachlan appear suddenly onscreen.

Yet there’s also another type of length of which we can’t help but be conscious, at least if we’re the kind of viewers likely to be watching Twin Peaks in the first place. We know that there are eighteen episodes in this season, the fourteenth of which aired last night, and the fact that we only have four hours left to go adds a degree of tension to the narrative that wouldn’t be there if we weren’t aware of it. This external pressure also depends on the knowledge that this is the only new season of the show that we’re probably going to get, which, given how hard it is to avoid this sort of news these days, is reasonable to expect of most fans. Maybe we’ve read the Rolling Stone interview in which David Lynch declared, in response to the question of whether there would be additional episodes: “I have no idea. It depends on how it goes over. You’re going to have to wait and see.” Or we’ve seen that David Nevins of Showtime said to Deadline: “It was always intended to be one season. A lot of people are speculating but there’s been zero contemplation, zero discussions other than fans asking me about it.” Slightly more promisingly, Kyle MacLachlan told the Hollywood Reporter: “I don’t know. David has said: ‘Everything is Twin Peaks.’ It leads me to believe that there are other stories to tell. I think it’s just a question of whether David and Mark want to tell them. I don’t know.” And Lynch even said to USA Today: “You never say never.” Still, it’s fair to say that the current season was conceived, written, and filmed to stand on its own, and until we know otherwise, we have to proceed under the assumption that this is the last time we’ll ever see these characters.

This has important implications for how we watch it from one week to the next. For one thing, it means that episodes near the end will play differently than they would have earlier in the season. Last night’s installment was relatively packed with incident—the revelation of the identity of Diane’s estranged half sister, Andy’s trip into the void, the green gardening glove, Monica Bellucci—but we’re also aware of how little time remains for the show to pay off any of these developments. Most series would have put an episode like this in the fourth slot, rather than the fourteenth, and given the show’s tendency to drop entire subplots for months, it leaves us keenly aware that many of these storylines may never be resolved. Every glimpse of a character, old or new, feels like a potential farewell. And with each episode that passes without the return of Agent Cooper, every minute in which we don’t see him increases our sense of urgency. (If this were the beginning of an open-ended run, rather than the presumptive final season, the response to the whole Dougie Jones thread would have been very different.) This information has nothing to do with the contents of the show itself, which, with one big exception, haven’t changed much since the premiere. But it’s hard not to think about it. In some ways, this may be the greatest difference between this season and the initial run, since there was always hope that the series would be renewed by ABC, or that Fire Walk With Me would tie off any loose ends. Unlike the first generation of fans, we know that this is it, and it can hardly fail to affect our impressions, even if Lynch still whispers in our heads: “You never say never.”